Former US President Donald Trump said on Monday that marking March 4, 2024 as the trial start date in the case in which he is accused constitutes “electoral interference” for next year’s presidential election.
Through a publication on the social network he founded, Truth Social, Trump accused U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, responsible for setting the date, of hating him, and vowed to appeal the decision.
Judge Tanya Chutkan has denied a defense request to postpone the trial until April 2026, about a year and a half after the 2024 election, but it also marked the beginning of the trial that would have sought to overturn the former US president. for after January, the month proposed by Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team.
“The public is entitled to a prompt and efficient resolution of this matter,” Chutkan claimed.
If the date is set, the trial will take place in the middle of the calendar of the Republican primaries (in which Trump will go to the polls tentatively, with a large lead over his opponents) and one day before “Super-Tuesday”, a crucial voting day, where most of the delegates are up for grabs.
Trump was indicted earlier this month on four counts of conspiracy to reverse the results of Democrat Joe Biden’s defeat in the 2020 election.
The federal election subversion case is one of four criminal charges against Trump pending before a court in Washington, DC.
Special Counsel Smith’s team has filed a separate federal lawsuit, accusing him of illegally withholding confidential documents at his Palm Beach, Florida mansion, Mar-a-Lago, and refusing to return them.
This case has a trial scheduled for May 20 next year.
Trump also faces lawsuits in New York and Georgia.
Manhattan prosecutors charge him with falsifying business records in a case related to paying a pornographic actress to obtain her silence in an extramarital affair.
Prosecutors in Fulton County, Georgia, are charging Trump and 18 others with conspiracy to alter the results of that state’s 2020 presidential election.
Trump appeared at a Georgia prison on the case on Thursday, posing for the first police photo of a former US president in US history.
Trump pleads not guilty to all charges, saying the investigations are politically motivated and an attempt to intervene to prevent him from returning to the White House.
Source: DN
